Monday, 31 May 2010

That teacher who bitched to New Jersy Governor Chris Christie about her salary—prompting him to let her know other employment opportunities exist—makes $86K, and over $100K including benefits. (Via InstaPundit.)

[On May 24], The New York Times published another front-page article based on a leaked classified document. This time, it was an order signed by Gen. David Petraeus authorizing black operations against adversaries and such dubious friends as Iran, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Gee, thanks. We really needed to know that. The world’s a better place now.

Yet the Times’ sin was the lesser one. The paper has long since given up any pretense of patriotism. (Ugh! Yuck!) Its editors are just publishing and perishing as citizens of the world.

It’s whoever leaked the document that bears the burn-in-hell blame.

We must be able to keep secrets in wartime. But we can’t. Because domestic political agendas trump national security in every administration nowadays.

Exposing that seven-page classified document warned our enemies (and pseudo friends) that we’ve expanded our efforts to uncover terror networks and potential targets. This not only increases the virulent paranoia in the region’s police states, but poses a mortal danger to agents, special operators and the innocent.

During a conference at which I just spoke, the owner of several companies showed me a pair of cufflinks he’d just had custom-made, engraved with the words “Who Is John Galt?” If the president isn’t familiar with Ayn Rand’s Galt, he might want to read up.

This business owner said the cuff-links were the last item other than absolute necessities that he would buy until Obama was an ex-president. He said he was sending out a letter to the restaurants and shops he patronized, his dry cleaners, the service companies that tended his lawns at his homes – over 200 different business owners – letting them know that President Obama had determined he was making too much money and was too rich for reason. Therefore, he was going to cut sales and production at his companies by half, himself work but one day a week, cut business spending to the bone and personally buy nothing – other than vacations out of the country – until the president exits.

Another law was broken by the White House’s job offer to Sestak, and the proof lies right in Bauer’s memo. The Hatch Act makes it illegal for a federal employee to use his official position or authority to interfere with or affect the result of an election. Unquestionably, the chief of staff’s offer of a presidential appointment to get Congressman Sestak to drop out — even if conveyed through his emissary Bill Clinton — constitutes the use of his official position to interfere with the result of an election. It could cost him his job.

The Hatch Act, which is enforced by the independent Office of Special Counsel (“OSC”), carries a penalty of removal from one’s government position for engaging in improper political activity. It applies to all federal employees except the president and vice president. It was initially enacted in 1939 (after being introduced by Sen. Carl Hatch of New Mexico) to limit patronage appointments within the civil service and to insulate government employees from pressure to participate (or to refrain from participating) in political activity, which is defined as an activity directed towards the election or defeat of a political candidate or party. This is what makes Mr. Bauer’s explanation so puzzling. In addition to trying to justify the job offer to Sestak by virtue of the position’s being unpaid and the fact that it was not conveyed to him directly, Mr. Bauer cited the “legitimate interest” of the Democratic party leadership in avoiding a divisive primary or in retaining Sestak’s congressional seat.

This last justification is preposterous. Advancing the interests of a political party is not a “legitimate” use of one’s official government position. The White House counsel cannot unilaterally exonerate the chief of staff’s misuse of his authority to manipulate the outcome of a Senate primary because the White House political advisers had deemed it inconvenient for their party to have a contested election.

Yes, America’s war dead have come from all over this nation. Yes, most are buried somewhere other than Arlington. But nearly all of them died a long way from home, and died at their posts, so Obambi’s honoring the war dead while at home in Chicago carries the tinge of afterthought.

The operation itself included some communications jamming, but the message sent by Israel in taking down “activists” trying to break a Gaza blockade is loud and clear. Israel doesn’t give a flying fuck about world opinion when its security is at stake. And Prime Minister Netanyahu’s canceling a meeting with Obambi, who months ago walked out of a meeting with him, is icing on the cake.

The Associated Press can’t help itself:

The operation in international waters off the Gaza coast was a nightmare scenario for Israel that looked certain to further damage its international standing, strain already tense relations with Turkey -- the unofficial sponsor of the mission -- and draw unwanted attention to Gaza’s plight.

What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.

The main advantage of the Pre-Obit over the traditional obituary is the knowledge of reader and writer alike that the as-good-as-dead people are still around to have their feelings hurt. It was a travesty of literary justice that we waited until J. D. Salinger finally hit the delete key at 91 before admitting that Catcher in the Rye stinks. The book’s only virtue is that it captures, with annoying accuracy, the maunderings of a twerp. The book’s only pleasure is in slamming the cover shut—simpler than slamming the door shut on a real Holden Caulfield, if less satisfying. The rest of Salinger’s published oeuvre was precious or boring or both. But we felt constrained to delay saying so, perhaps because of an outdated Victorian hope for a death-bed flash of genius.

Let us wait no more. With the Pre-Obituary we can abandon pusillanimous constraint and false hope and say what we think about the lives of public nuisances when their lives are not yet a dead letter. And we won’t be stuck in the treacle of nostalgia and sentiment. We won’t find ourselves saying of some oaf, “His like will not pass this way again.” Or, if we do say it, we can comfortably add, “Thank God!” The precept of Diogenes isn’t “Do not speak ill of the living.”

Think of the opportunities we’ve missed already. Bea Arthur (1922-2009) performed a grievous disservice to popular culture by uniting two equally dreadful but previously discrete American types. In her portrayal of loud, Bolshie Maude, Arthur taught every angry feminist to be a common scold and every termagant housewife to be Emma Goldman. Once Arthur had become respectable by dying no one had the nerve to title her funeral notice “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Paul Newman (1925-2008) was not, in and of himself, a bad person. But he deserved to be damned to his face for lending charm to the smirk of liberalism. And after he’d become an immortal only a heartless writer would have pointed out that for an entire generation of young people, Paul Newman is, mainly, a salad dressing.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was, in and of himself, a bad person. He taught economics at Harvard, served in FDR’s Office of Price Administration, was chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, and, after 97 years of comfort and achievement in a free market society, still believed that a free market society is wrong. Maybe it is, if it provides comfort and achievement to John Kenneth Galbraiths. There’s a special stove-top perch in the kitchen corner of hell for witty, urbane, prosperous, and celebrated leftists. It would have been nice to tell John about it before he took his seat.

Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.

How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it. For the more ideologically committed, there’s always the awareness-raising rock concert: it’s something to do with Bono and debt forgiveness, whatever that means, but let’s face it, going to the park for eight hours of celebrity caterwauling beats having to wrap your head around Afro-Marxist economics. The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

[...]

The green jobs, the gay parades, the jihadist welfare queens, the Greek public sector unions, all have to be paid for by a shrinking base of contributing workers whose children and grandchildren will lead poorer and meaner lives because of the fecklessness of government. The social compact of the postwar era cannot hold. Across the developed world, a beleaguered middle class is beginning to understand that it’s no longer that rich. At some point, it will look at the sheer waste of government spending, the other shoe will drop, and it will decide that it no longer wishes to be that stupid.